Since the release of his 2023 record, 'The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored', Pedigo earned widespread critical acclaim, performed a stunning NPR Tiny Desk Concert, toured non-stop with the likes of Jenny Lewis, Devendra Banhart and Hiss Golden Messenger, and more. He then decamped on a 20,000-acre ranch at an artist residency in Wyoming to write his new album, which he’d later record in Ojai with Scott Hirsch and name for a “pretty devastating” episode of Little House on the Prairie from 1978. The resulting album, 'I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away', is the final installment of what Pedigo has dubbed 'The Motor Trilogy’ – his three latest solo albums, tied together by their vehicular Jonathan Phillips artwork. An innovator of the instrumental genre, challenger of the stereotypical, and son of a truck-stop preacher, Pedigo has crafted an intentionally maximalist, genre-resistant work of warped instrumental Americana on this release, which he calls “a micro-dose psychedelic album…as if somebody had cut up a tab of LSD and put on a Fahey record.” 

TRACK LISTING

1. Long Pond Lily
2. All The Way Across
3. Smoked
4. Houndstooth
5. Hermes
6. Small Torch
7. I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma returns with 'Gift Songs', a deep distillation of touchstones and influences drawn from the natural world and his spiritual practice. Enlisting a brilliant cast of collaborators, and blending a rich sonic palette of guitar, modular synthesizer, and acoustic instrumentation and arrangements, Cantu-Ledesma illuminates a profound sense of humanity and transcendent possibilities across a suite of five sublimely minimal compositions.

Drawing its title from Cantu-Ledesma’s belief that music is a gift, a form of magic, born from specific conditions, rather than a singular conception, and as a nod to Shaker “gift drawings,” regarded as gifts from God to maker, the slow emergence of Gift Songs provoked in the artist how one might sculpt instrumentation and arrangements to invoke experiences in the natural world: “being amongst running waters, hearing wind through trees, or the rhythm of hiking to a vista with friends at twilight.”

The resulting sound, subtly influenced by Cantu-Ledesma's parallel practices as a Zen priest and a hospice worker, provokes a deep resonance with the landscape and rhythm of the seasons of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where he settled with his family four years prior, around the release of his last album, 'Tracing Back the Radiance', each movement, shift, and transition built from evolutions of microscopic change.

In conceiving 'Gift Songs', Cantu-Ledesma embraced the possibilities of openness and chance: allowing for the interplay of sounds to guide its course under the direction of the album’s collaborators: Omer Shemesh (piano, arrangements), Joseph Weiss (engineering, bass guitar), Clarice Jensen (cello), and Booker Stardrum (percussion). What emerged was a desire to work as acoustically, and environmentally attuned,, as possible, showcasing the humanity of the performers, and an unexpected love affair with piano and percussion, the rhythms and tones of which speckle across the album’s effortless flow.

From the shimmering clarity of arpeggiating piano that marks the album’s first few bars, quickly submerged in dense textures of rhythm and tone, 'Gift Songs' presents a sense of ambient grace: sonorities that dance outside of time and space, implying something far greater than themselves. Amounting to a deeply organic and introspective form of minimalism that emphasizes the distinct qualities and idiosyncrasies of each instrument and its player, 'Gift Songs' manifests as a series of conversant movements within a greater whole.

As the densities of 'The Milky Sea' subside, Cantu-Ledesma arcs into achingly exposed spaces, carved by sparse piano lines atop delicate chaplain organ drones that glacially unfold across 'Gift Song I', 'Gift Song II', and 'Gift Song III', before concluding with the rising glow of 'River That Flows Two Ways', an immersive, long-tone work for Hammond B3 and pump organs.

Refined and deeply emotive, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s 'Gift Songs' encounters the veteran, process-based experimentalist unveiling a profound meaning within the elegance of its lattice of sound, occurrence, and space.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Milky Sea
2. Gift Song I
3. Gift Song II
4. Gift Song III
5. River That Flows Two Ways

Charleston, SC-based artist Contour announces his new album and debut for Mexican Summer, ‘Take Off from Mercy’.

Working with the likes of Saul Williams, Mndsgn and co-producer Omari Jazz, ‘Take Off from Mercy’ documents a journey through past and present, night and day, denial and serene acceptance. Contour (real name Khari Lucas) envisions ‘Take Off from Mercy’ as an epic within the pitch dark of night leading to a cloudy resolution.

Our narrator is a prodigal son who must wander through the wiles of excess to approach grace; his journey mirroring that of the protagonist in Toni Morrison’s epochal third novel, ‘Song of Solomon’. To deepen these themes, Lucas is revealing the album in three portions - ‘Night’, ‘Evening’ and ‘Morning’. This phrasing reflects the narrative arc of the album while providing a broader sonic context to the singles. The cinematic scope of this voyage comes to the fore in the accompanying three-part short film directed by Lucas and T.V (Tshay, Vernon Jordan III).

‘Night’ drops us off in the dead of night. In the world of this album, a night can steer towards bliss or paranoia. ‘Theresa’’s loping breakbeat, soaring atmospherics and dream logic lyrics gesture towards the sublime, yet even here, there's a foreboding edge. “I’m dreaming of the last time I saw you dancing,” Lucas intones. “Silver linings each time, they hang me.” The subtle swells and countermelodies give ‘Theresa’ its floating, breathing quality. ‘Gin Rummy’, meanwhile, is more foreboding, a gambler's lament that sees our protagonist weaving a cautionary tale. Our hero “searches for heaven,” finds it, then lets it slip through his hands like sand.

Contour’s body of work is evidence of a restless curiosity that culminates on ‘Take Off from Mercy’. Starting off as a beatmaker, Lucas’s vision has broadened over releases like ‘Onwards!’, ‘Love Suite’, and ‘Weight’, spanning from sample-driven soul to covers of Strawberry Switchblade. On ‘Take Off from Mercy’, Lucas eschews samples in favour of guitar-driven songwriting, a move that immediately places him in a metaphysical conversation with a long line of Southern songwriters. “It immediately got me thinking about the itinerant Southern bluesman,” Lucas says. “The guitar as your only companion while traveling, the instrument as a tool to document your own story and carry on generational tales and traditions.”

When speaking about the blues, Lucas cites a line from New York emcee and producer E L U C I D on the provenance of the art form: “There'd be no blues if I was blameless.” Yet in the world of ‘Take Off from Mercy’, the blues are inescapable and we are bound by history, even if we’re under no obligation to repeat it. In the process of writing and recording ‘Take Off from Mercy’, Lucas toured constantly and began to understand underlying themes within his lineage. He discovered his father tried his hand as a musician before a period of wandering. His mother painted a mural that still rests in the Atlanta subway system. And Lucas’s ancestors crisscrossed from south and north and back again during The Great Migration. Our protagonist is still in motion, seeking an answer on some unknown horizon.

TRACK LISTING

If He Changed My Name
Now We’re Friends
Faith
Entry 10-4 (Mood Recipe)
Watchword
(re)Turn
Mercy
Ark Of Bones
Guitar Bains
The Earth Spins
Theresa
Gin Rummy
Reflexion
Seasonal
For Ocean

An album about his “love for Brazilian music and its many shapes and colors,” Sao Paulo-born Sessa’s debut 'Grandeza' set the scene for who The New Yorker called a “songwriter cut from Veloso’s mold and blessed with a flair for the intimate, the enigmatic, and the licentious.’ 

TRACK LISTING

1. Grandeza
2. Tesão Central
3. Gata Mágica
4. Flor Do Real
5. Sangue Bom
6. Dez Total (Filhos De Gandhy)
7. Infinitamente Nu
8. Orgia
9. Tanto
10. Língua Geral
11. Toda Instância Do Prazer

From the perspective of people who categorize music by genres and types, Evan Shornstein, better-known under his production moniker Photay, has created lots of different kinds of sounds over the past decade. There’s the Hudson Valley-raised, Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist composer’s quasi-IDM and electronic almost-pop tracks with the occasional vocal; the improvised organic and and experimental music sessions he participates in alongside new age giants, Laraaji and Carlos Niño; the diaspora electronic folk-jazz he makes with veteran musicians from all over the globe; and the disco and house adjacent records he tag-team DJs with Brooklyn producer Cesar Toribio and engineer Phil Moffa (who also masters all of Photay’s records — and those of dance-music dons around the world). But if you’ve listened closely to Shornstein’s prodigious output, you know that separating and classifying the work is actually contrary to the energy of Photay music. That what on-the-surface may lazily appear as differences, is actually brought together by a shared sonic warmth, a hardware pastoralism at play. Whatever category he engages, Photay makes outdoor music under the spell of the elements, for the purpose of different human movements — some physical, some spiritual, some emotional, some philosophical.

TRACK LISTING

1. Forecast
2. Global Wind Trade
3. Air Lock
4. Zephyr
5. Derecho
6. Barely There
7. Thermal Loop
8. Low Pressure System
9. Still Existing

Flying Wig is an album of recurrent dualities; a can of paradoxes, a box of worms. The redwood and pine-surrounded cabin studio where Banhart was “constantly listening to The Grateful Dead” somehow birthed something slick, modernist, city pop-adjacent and Enoesque.

Banhart's eleventh record, it's the actualisation of a “precious friendship” with the acclaimed solo artist, multi-instrumentalist, producer and Mexican Summer stable-mate Cate Le Bon — a coming together prophesied by the mirror-image titles of their early solo albums (Banhart’s 2002 Oh Me Oh My to Le Bon’s 2009 Me Oh My) and a tenderness built on crude haircuts (“we finally met, soon after she was cutting my hair with a fork and that was that”) and home-made tattoos — but never previously translated into the recording studio.

“It’s about transmuting despair into gratitude, wounds into forgiveness, and grief into praise,” - the product of a ritualistic creative practice that melts down and re-casts as it mulls, the stuff of sadness beautified as it changes shape — culminating in a record that “sounds like getting a very melancholic massage, or weeping, but in a really nice outfit… if I’m going to cry, I wanna do it in my best dress.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A silk-smooth melting pot of neo-soul, woozy Balearic and city pop, all topped with Banhart's syrupy vocals. There are hooks aplenty, but they sit beneath waves of reverb-drenched keys, guitar and bursts of trill brass.

TRACK LISTING

1. Feeling
2. Fireflies
3. Nun
4. Sight Seer
5. Sirens
6. Charger
7. Flying Wig
8. Twin
9. May
10. The Party

To mark its ten year anniversary, Mexican Summer presents a new, limited edition pressing of No Joy’s classic album Wait to Pleasure expanded with two new tracks from the beloved band's original line up. Wait To Pleasure is the product of the Montreal noise-pop band’s first foray in a fullyfurnished studio environment. Here the band has flourished, delivering their finest set to date, rooted heavily in shoegaze ripcurls and devastating melody, finishing sentences whispered long ago with depth, variance and force. Singer-guitarists Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd and drummer Garland Hastings knock down the fence between nostalgiaand modernity, chaos and control, in a perfectly- realized effort made to bridge their uncompromised musical pasts with the alarmist tendencies of the present. Wait To Pleasure found No Joy set loose in Mexican Summer’s studio, Gary’s Electric, for two weeks in 2012, with producer Jorge Elbrecht at the helm. “Our earlier records are purely guitar-based, rock band lineups,” Laura adds, “and with Wait To Pleasure we seized the opportunity to change things up a bit.”

TRACK LISTING

1. E
2. Hare Tarot Lies
3. Prodigy
4. Slug Night
5. Blue Neck Riviera
6. Lizard Kids
7. Lunar Phobia
8. Wrack Attack
9. Ignored Pets
10. Pleasure
11. Uhy Yuoi Yoi
12. Dorion (Bonus Track)
13. Beauty (Bonus Track)

After recently releasing the critically-acclaimed Plains album (I Walked With You A Ways) with Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, Jess Williamson’s Time Ain’t Accidental is the sound of a woman running into her life and art head-on. With a vocal dynamic kindred to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, Williamson blends the emotional immediacy and story-telling of traditional country with the artful, wholly honest transmissions of songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Terry Allen. The album's reckoning with loss, isolation, romance, and personal reclamation signals both a stylistic and tectonic shift for Williamson: from someone who once made herself small to an artist emboldened by her power as an individual.

TRACK LISTING

1. Time Ain’t Accidental
2. Hunter
3. Chasing Spirits
4. Tobacco Two Step
5. God In Everything
6. A Few Seasons
7. Topanga Two Step
8. Something’s In The Way
9. Stampede
10. I’d Come To Your Call
11. Roads

Shake The Feeling: Outtakes & Rarities 2015-2021, Iceage's second full length for Mexican Summer, is a collection of non-LP cuts (or “misfit children,” as lead singer Elias Bender Rønnenfelt describes them) from the seven years during which Iceage made Plowing Into the Field of Love (2014), Beyondless (2018), and Seek Shelter (2021). As with all of Iceage’s albums, whether it be the sensual daring-do of their dark-hardcore masterpiece debut, the Flying Nun-dappled “Oi!!!!” of You’re Nothing, the shift to cowpunk gothic romanticism on Plowing Into the Field of Love, or the space truckin’ gospel-rock of their most recent albums, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, Johan Suurballe Wieth, Jakob Tvilling Pless and Dan Kjær Nielsen make the impossible seem effortless.

Dungen, torch bearers of Sweden’s rich and fabled history of pastoral psychedelia, return with En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog, the band’s first full-length album since 2015’s Allas Sak. Creating their own critical and fervent, fan-based lane for guitar-powered, melodic and magisterial rock ‘n’ roll when their 2004 album Ta Det Lugnt broke down, and though, global barriers, Dungen have since left a staggering array of albums, and a prodigious live presence, in the embers of their burning wake. En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog (English translation: "One is too much and a thousand is never enough") finds Dungen’s core four members Gustav Ejstes, Reine Fiske, Mattias Gustavsson, and Johan Holmegard in pure form, their now decades deep collaboration in total focus and elevated to new heights unobstructed by the spirits that once haunted and shaped the band’s music.

TRACK LISTING

1. Skövde
2. Om Det Finns Något Som Du Vill Fråga Mig
3. Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus
4. Möbler
5. Höstens Färger
6. Var Har Du Varit?
7. Klockan Slår Den Är Mycket Nu
8. En Är För Mycket Och Tusen Aldrig Nog
9. Om Natten

After an overwhelming response to the fifth anniversary edition of Cardamom Times in 2020, Weyes Blood’s (Natalie Mering) warm, elegiac early career record manifests once again in 2021 as an Indie Exclusive Edition on transparent light blue vinyl with purple and maroon splatter, only available from the artist and at independent retail worldwide. The reimagined cover art for Cardamom Times transports the viewer to a desolate, urban paradise during sunset — Jamaica Bay in Queens, New York. A couple is laying on the ground, caught in a comfort beyond time while surrounded by a rusting reality. Since the EP’s release, Weyes Blood’s Front Row Seat to Earth (Mexican Summer, 2016) and Titanic Rising (Sub Pop, 2019) were both named Best New Albums by Pitchfork, with the latter making multiple Best Albums of 2019 lists, including The Guardian, Pitchfork, and The Independent.

Different from these elaborate albums, Cardamom Times was recorded onto reel-to-reel tape at Mering’s home studio in Rockaway Beach, New York. The songs of Cardamom Times demonstrate Mering’s reverence of devotional music and the avant-garde, channeling the domestic hymns of Sybille Baer through the lens of Baltimore’s experimental DIY scene; the minimal, melodic drones of Terry Riley accompanied by the voices of the Sacre Coeur; the confrontational words of Anaïs Nin along with the warm embrace of St. Augustine. With Cardamom Times, Mering invites listeners into that space of love and longing, struggle and change, surrounded by the decay of time that perpetually embraces us.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Maybe Love
A2. Take You There
B1. Cardamom
B2. In The Beginning

"His songs sound like memories, as familiar as they are foreign. I’m addicted to this record.” - Cate Le Bon. In a time rife with alienation, Magic Touch, the third album by the ubiquitous and mysterious Jack Name, offers the comfort of contact. With a body of work that ranges from the catchy to the cacophonous, Name has earned the reputation of a musician who’s difficult to define. For over a decade, he’s been a fixture in the Los Angeles underground. His songs have appeared on albums by U.S. Girls (Heavy Light, 2020) and White Fence (Family Perfume, 2012); he’s produced recordings for Cass McCombs and collaborated with Ariel Pink; and his experimental music has been performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Magic Touch reveals yet another side of Jack Name. While it’s every bit as intricate as his previous releases, 2014’s Light Show and 2015’s Weird Moons, here he’s done away with the dense production of his earlier work to make a record that feels stark, personal, and effortlessly natural. With Magic Touch, Name brings his lyrical and conceptual focus away from the dream worlds of his first two albums and back to Earth: a simpler place, or so it seems, where humans are falling in and out of love, struggling with loneliness, reaching for connections to each other, and, for better or worse, affecting each other. In a year like 2020, it’s a place that feels familiar and far away all at once. The almost subliminal story arc of Magic Touch reminds us that touch itself is magic.

TRACK LISTING

1. Karolina
2. Do You Know Ida No?
3. Having A Good Time
4. A Moving-on Blues
5. I Came To Tell You In Plain English
6. Dudette
7. Losing My Way
8. Empty Nights
9. Kick-around Johnny
10. Sacred Place

• On vinyl for the first time since its first sold-out pressing in 2015, the fifth anniversary of Weyes Blood’s (Natalie Mering) warm and elegiac record, Cardamom Times, is celebrated with a deluxe Dinked edition.

• Since the EP’s release, Weyes Blood’s Front Row Seat to Earth (Mexican Summer, 2016) and Titanic Rising (Sub Pop, 2019) were both named Best New Albums by Pitchfork, with the latter making multiple Best Albums of 2019 lists, including The Guardian, Pitchfork, and The Independent. Different from these elaborate albums, Cardamom Times was recorded onto reel-to-reel tape at Mering’s home studio in Rockaway Beach, New York.

• The songs of Cardamom Times demonstrate Mering’s reverence of devotional music and the avant-garde, channeling the domestic hymns of Sybille Baer through the lens of Baltimore’s experimental DIY scene; the minimal, melodic drones of Terry Riley accompanied by the voices of the Sacre Coeur; the confrontational words of Anaïs Nin along with the warm embrace of St. Augustine.

• This anniversary edition of Cardamom Times features reimagined cover art with the focal image of a desolate paradise during sunset — Jamaica Bay in Queens, NY surrounded by rust. A couple is laying on the ground, caught in a comfort beyond time. With Cardamom Times, Mering invites listeners into that space of love and longing, struggle and change, surrounded by the decay of time that perpetually embraces us.

TRACK LISTING

01. Maybe Love
02. Take You There
03. Cardamom
04. In The Beginning

It's 2020, and everyone is exhausted. The world is falling apart, and then there's the day-today stress of just existing in the modern world. Keeping up with everything feels impossible, and we all feel that neverending push to always be productive, inspiration and motivation be damned. For NYC artist Photay (a.k.a. Evan Shornstein), none of this is particularly conducive to living a healthy existence, let alone being creative, but he's decided to face it head on.

Waking Hours, his second full-length (following 2017's Onism), is a meditation on time and, more specifically, our obsessive need to fill every moment with activity. "It's about getting back to a really simple notion of just celebrating your existence and not necessarily attaching this huge story of who you are and what you do," he says. "It's about finding comfort in just being." Photay's search for calm is at the very core of Waking Hours, and while he admits that making the album was therapeutic, it shouldn't be mistaken for some sort of healing ambient excursion.

The LP is largely electronic, but frequently verges on pop and extensively features Shornstein's own vocals. The music is intimate and inviting, but it also suggests that Photay is perhaps at his best when he's blurring genre boundaries. "I really truly love so many different types of music," he says, "and for this album I opened things up and gave myself the freedom to go anywhere."

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Existential Celebration
2. Warmth In The Coldest Acre
3. Is It Right?
4. Fanfare For 7.83 Hz
5. Change In Real Time

SIDE B

1. The People
2. Rhythm Research
3. Pressure
4. EST
5. A Beautiful Silence Prevails

CMON is the new recording project of Josh da Costa and Jamen Whitelock. Even as they established themselves as integral members of New York’s DIY scene with their band Regal Degal, da Costa and Whitelock were acutely aware of how closed off they had become. As Regal Degal mounted its final tour, with clubs pushing their set times earlier and earlier to make space for the DJs who followed da Costa and Whitelock took notes. “We were definitely getting swept further from where we wanted to be and the excitement we wanted to portray,” Whitelock says. “There’s such joy in going out and dancing that was completely missing in a lot of shows, especially in New York. Nobody wants to move, everyone’s too self-conscious. But when you go to the club, everyone’s in it—you just want to dance, and that’s all that matters.”

The community potential and the promise of physical liberation that came with dance music spoke loudly to both da Costa and Whitelock, and following the dissolution of Regal Degal, da Costa set up a new life for himself in Los Angeles—a steady relationship, a pet bird, a car —and got down to work with a copy of Ableton. Back in New York, his head spun by DJ Rashad, Whitelock was learning to program, too. They kept their line of communication open, and eventually Whitelock started making the cross-country trek to work and record with his old bandmate. They mined the sound they established with Regal Degal, applying their old band’s heavy atmospherics and melancholy soul to four-on-the-floor rhythm grids and smoothed-out guitar lines, taking production cues from EBM and AOR in equal measure. If Confusing Mix of Nations is a tour of anything, though, it’s not countries so much as psychic spaces.

Each of its ten tracks feels like a postcard from an aesthetic territory worth returning to. Opener “Coo” begins with locked-in grooves reminiscent of Drugdealer (for whom da Costa drums) or Mild High Club, until it suddenly gives itself over to a rhythm that’s been chattering away in the back of the track. As da Costa and Whitelock follow its hints, “Coo” suddenly inverts its priorities and sounds like Miami bass all leaned out for Halloween, then calmly returns to the opening groove, the only proof of the excursion an excess of delay on da Costa’s vocal. “Peter Pan” struts like it’s on its way to meet side two of Sandinista! in its verses, then glows with New Romantic shine in the chorus. The pop hooks on “Good to Know” feel like they could set off a festival crowd, but they’re offset by a strange hollow ache at the song’s center—a weird sadness that makes you feel a little bad for dancing to it.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A

1. Coo
2. Good To Know
3. Dreamfucking
4. Celluloid
5. Mindboggling

SIDE B

1. Peter Pan
2. Sam
3. Zoo
4. Base
5. Letdown

It was on a mountainside in Cumbria that the first whispers of Cate Le Bon’s fifth studio album poked their buds above the earth. “There’s a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night,” she says, recounting the year living solitarily in the Lake District which gave way to Reward. By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers - the first piano she had ever owned - for company, “windows closed to absolutely everyone”, and accidentally poured her heart out. The result is an album every bit as stylistically varied, surrealistically-inclined and tactile as those in the enduring outsider’s back catalogue, but one that is also intensely introspective and profound; her most personal to date.

This sense of privacy maintained throughout is helped by the various landscapes within which Reward took shape: Stinson Beach, LA, and Brooklyn via Cardiff and The Lakes. Recording at Panoramic House [Stinson Beach, CA], a residential studio on a mountain overlooking the ocean, afforded Le Bon the ability to preserve the remoteness she had captured during the writing of Reward in Staveley, Lake District.

Over this extended period a cast of trusted and loved musicians joined Le Bon, Khouja and fellow co-producer Josiah Steinbrick - Stella Mozgawa (of Warpaint) on drums and percussion; Stephen Black (aka Sweet Baboo) on bass and saxophone and longtime collaborators Huw Evans (aka H.Hawkline) and Josh Klinghoffer on guitars - and were added to the album, “one by one, one on one”. The fact that these collaborators have appeared variously on Le Bon’s previous outputs no doubt goes some way to aid the preservation of a signature sound despite a relatively drastic change in approach.

Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh My or critically acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum, Cate Le Bon’s solo work - and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on recent Deerhunter album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (4AD, January 2019) - has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster.

The multifaceted nature of Le Bon’s art - its ability to take on multiple meanings and hold motivations which are not immediately obvious - is evident right down to the album’s very name. “People hear the word ‘reward’ and they think that it’s a positive word” says Le Bon, “and to me it’s quite a sinister word in that it depends on the relationship between the giver and the receiver. I feel like it’s really indicative of the times we’re living in where words are used as slogans, and everything is slowly losing its meaning.” The record, then, signals a scrambling to hold onto meaning; it is a warning against lazy comparisons and face values. It is a sentiment nicely summed up by the furniture-making musician as she advises: “Always keep your hand behind the chisel.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Emily says: Cate Le Bon’s fifth album came together during a period of self imposed solitude in the Lake District. Retreating from L.A. to a mountainside in Cumbria, she spent a year building wooden furniture and penning songs into the night. While writing an album in the woods may sound like a bit of an old singer-songwriter cliché, Le Bon’s offering is far from the soppy acoustic balladry you might expect. Instead, she has produced an album of delightfully unhinged art-pop which reveals the curiosities of her inner world.
‘Reward’ retains the off-kilter whimsy which is characteristic of Le Bon’s ever expanding back catalogue. She expertly toes the line between heartfelt sincerity and playful absurdity, maintaining an edge to her songwriting which keeps it from sounding twee. Some of her vocal melodies alone would feel at home in a more conventional pop album, but the instrumentation elevates it to outsider status - discordant stings of electric guitar, metallic synths and an anxious ticking always lurking in the background.
The slow, stately opener “Miami” builds through a rising dialogue between the vocals, horns and synth which eventually disappears into thin air. Le Bon then takes us on a soft rock jaunt permeated by a sense of distance and longing: “Love you, I love you, but you’re not here”. “Mother’s Mother’s Magazines” spirals into nervy post punk territory, with each instrument locked into a mechanical groove which rolls forwards like a steam train. But it’s the final song “Meet The Man” which shines the brightest lyrically and melodically, ending the album with a heartwarming resolution: “Love is good, love is ancient to me, love is you, love is beautiful to me”.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Miami
2. Daylight Matters
3. Home To You
4. Mother's Mother's Magazines
5. Here It Comes Again

SIDE B
1. Sad Nudes
2. The Light
3. Magnificent Gestures
4. You Don't Love Me
5. Meet The Man

Soft Hell, Pill’s second full-length album, is a raucous, splintering dispatch from New York City, animated by the madcap ingenuity of a foursome finding a palpable sense of joy and play in expressions of caustic, black humour. Like the contradiction of the album title, which references our acceptance of everyday miseries, it’s a slew of dichotomies, a frenzied cutup. It’s bleeding saxophone and lustrous feedback sounding somehow pastoral, and winking hooks subtly infused with venom. Pill’s lyrics are severe and funny, cryptic and straightforward, but never didactic. They reliably interrogate power. Vocalist and bassist Veronica Torres, a poet and visual artist, has cited as influences J .P. 'The Big Bopper' Richardson and Ian Svenonius, apt references for her wildly expressive range. Atop the clattering rush of opener “A.I.Y.M.” she uses an ambiguous narrator to complicate gendered stereotypes, while “Fruit,” a coolly pulsing vamp, explores the paralysis of political anxiety. “What am I allowed to create or destroy?” she asks in “Power Abuser,” highlighting the inanity of needing to ask for permission. Pill resent complacency, whether in political or creative senses. “For me this band’s about being provocative with sound,” said saxophonist Benjamin Jaffe. Drummer Andrew Spaulding said the album title, Soft Hell, critiques the “work-to-play” cliché of New York life, with its breakneck, competitive pursuit of comfort. Torres added that it evokes sexual bondage, describing Soft Hell as a reference to the cyclical monotony of humans harming one another.

TRACK LISTING

1.Softer Side
2.A.I.Y.M?
3. Double Think
4. Dark Glass
5.Midtown
6.Fruit
7.Plastic
8.HaHa
9. Sin Compromiso
10. Power Abuser
11.Soft Hell
12. OK

Jassbusters is Connan Mockasin’s third album and first in five years. An unclassifiable, unconventional album that neither picks up from nor abandons the modes of 2013’s widely-embraced Caramel or its 2010 predecessor Forever Dolphin Love, Jassbusters foreshadows a five-part melodrama film titled Bostyn 'n Dobsyn, created by Mockasin.

Jassbusters soundtracks the unpredictable narrative of the film in eclectic, electric ways.

Whether bending genres or collaborating with artists like James Blake, MGMT, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Connan Mockasin has always maneuvered in mysterious ways. After touring with the likes of Radiohead and Neil & Liam Finn (Crowded House), the R&B surrealist continues assembling a cult around his theater, nay spectacle of life with Bostyn ’n Dobsyn screenings and Jassbusters performances throughout October and November 2018.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Smooth as silk, Connan Mockasin smashes out some softly sung utterances and syncopated jazzy flourishes on his newest LP for the excellent Mexican Summer. Weirdo R&B meets with shimmering lounge and almost-vertical soul in this thoroughly entertaining suite. Brilliant.

TRACK LISTING

1. Charlotte's Thong
2. Momo's
3. Last Night
4. You Can Do Anything
5. Con Conn Was Impatient
6. B'nD
7. Sexy Man
8. Les Be Honest

A reference to the Jungian idea of synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidences,” Cosmic Wink is as much a reflection on inspired companionship as it is a rebirth. Jess Williamson fell deeply in love, and then her life was uprooted; she left Texas for California, leaving behind the roadworn verses of her previous albums for brighter, bolder songwriting.

The Byrds-ian jangle of album opener “I See The White” airbrushes halos around the brain with an immortal pop hook. When Williamson asks her listener to “tell me everything you know about consciousness,” it’s an invitation down a two lane blacktop, both vessels heading the same direction.

The Rhodes-soaked “Wild Rain” begins with a ghostly air until a swell of synths gives way like the heavens parting. Williamson’s voice emerges from the clouds promising that she will “treasure your patience / from you I learned what it means to make a family.”

Concluding with “Love On the Piano,” Williamson’s new musical and lyrical mind declares “Love is my name now / Love, Darlin” over a revolving acoustic guitar line and lightly pressed upright piano notes. Vulnerability can feel something less vulnerable when love - true, deep love - creates a latticework to hang the frame of our humanity, which in many ways is the message underlying the entire album.

TRACK LISTING

1. I See The White
2. Awakening Baby
3. White Bird
4. Wild Rain
5. Thunder Song
6. Mama Proud
7. Dream State
8. Forever
9. Love On The Piano

On the Echoing Green is an elegant work of lush, shimmering sound, rendered with a singular touch by eternal electric romantic Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. In contrast to the haze and hermetic process of previous albums, Green was conceived as a deliberate experiment in clarity and collaboration: “I was interested in trying to bring out more overt pop elements, to let them come to the front and be present. I also have more trust now in letting things happen – trusting other people’s musicianship, and being open to people’s ideas. Eventually, things emerge.” What emerged from this bond are eight rapturous and richly melodic slow dives of swirling guitar, bass, synthesizer, piano, and drum machines, dramatically accented in places by heavenly arcs of voice courtesy of Argentinian singer-songwriter Sobrenadar. Cantu-Ledesma encouraged chemistry and intuition in the studio by beginning the album without any demos for reference; he and his collaborators pursued patterns and hypnotic textures across long-form improvisations until gradually songs began to take shape. This is music of growth and grandeur, of ascent and exploration, played with purpose and passion by a craftsman in tune with the beauty of sound and the harmony of light. In his words: “[This album] feels like spring – things coming alive, blooming, emerging from winter.”

TRACK LISTING

1. In A Copse
2. A Song Of Summer
3. Echoing Green
4. The Faun
5. Tenderness
6. Vulgar Latin
7. Autumn
8. Dancers At The Spring
9. Door To Night

Riding on a cloud of smoke, psychedelic travelers Shadow Band make sounds that move like foggy dreams from fantastical lands. Their patient but powerful songs set in motion a series of refracting echoes that call forth images of medieval battles, spirits unseen by human eyes, and the gentle, constant pulsing of the universe. The band formed organically around the songwriting of Mike Bruno, a quiet figure whose vibrant mental landscape is the center of the group’s orbit. Growing up in New Jersey, Bruno immersed himself in a self-made world of gloomy sonic alchemy, honing his songcraft as a solo act in New Brunswick's small-but-dedicated freak scene. The early years saw Bruno attracting a rotating cast of area heads around his growing arsenal of songs and dubbing it Black Magic Family Band. The sprawling web of artists varied with every gig and recording session, but the roots of Shadow Band started here. Sonically, the homespun production mirrors the communal environment in which they were made. Layers of murky instrumentation congeal into a singular sound, with strange stringed instruments, theremin vibrations and buried percussion all washing by as a solid alien texture. Songs melt into one another to the sound of distant birds and pagan pan flutes only to rise up in swells of unholy synth.

TRACK LISTING

1. Green Riverside
2. Endless Night
3. Shadowland
4. Eagle Unseen
5. In The Shade
6. Indian Summer
7. Morning Star
8. Mad John
9. Illuminate
10. Darksiders' Blues
11. Daylight

Convenience skids like a garbage truck with no brakes, barreling through passages of guitar chording bent at the wrong angles and ring-modded riffs aligning with Benjamin Jaffe’s expressive sax before splitting apart into chaos. Veronica Torres assumes double-duty between vocals and bass, while Jon Campolo plays three instruments in the live setting and Andrew Spaulding four, including circuit-bent noise rigs of their own invention. Veronica’s words are delivered with the speed and frenzy of someone with their life on the line, but she’s also able to slow things down in a gesture of dominance, confidence, and trust. This band is wise enough to know that safety is fleeting, so they take their digs when and where they can.

Given Pill's backgrounds, their music advances a notion of what the punk spirit of NYC might be: the capture and distillation of the energy and friction that comes from living amongst so many people in such a confined space. The idea seeds in free jazz and improvisation; reached adolescence in galleries and loft spaces in the ‘70s; found politics in squats and independent spaces; and it grows stronger the more these several sensibilities are practiced ands stewed. Call them No wave, post-punk, noise; they are immune, content to head off in a direction of their own design.

TRACK LISTING

1. 60 Sec.
2. Which Is True?
3. My Rights
4. Fetish Queen
5. Dead Boys
6. J-E-N-O-V-A
7. 100% Cute
8. Sex With Santa
9. Speaking Up
10. Vagabond
11. Love & Other Liquids
12. Medicine 

Union and Return is the third album from Luke Wyatt’s Torn Hawk. It was composed and recorded entirely by Wyatt at his home in Berlin and is inspired by painters like Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Caspar David Friedrich. Here. Wyatt parts the gauze that shrouded his former work to reveal a lush and ornate set of compositions -- elegantly orchestrated, awash in unguarded emotion.

Having spent years working with gritty production techniques, Wyatt seems refreshed and restored by the possibilities of definition and detail. Many tracks were initially composed on piano and then painstakingly fleshed out into final form. The feel is spontaneous, rather than labored, and the pieces possess an organic and grid-less grace. On album opener “The Romantic,” the flow of ideas is natural, seamlessly transferring melodies and themes from voice to voice, instrument to instrument. Orchestral arrangements give way to layered guitars, smeared pads and collaged digital detritus.

While the record luxuriates in subtle, delicate dynamics, Union and Return is just as disruptive as anything in his back catalog. Tracks like “Feeling is Law” and “Die Swimming in the Sea Here” supply a full-bore tenderness that can be uncomfortable, especially for those projecting a policed gruff or “masculine” image. This disruption is key to the music’s intent - gentle music as a tough gesture.

TRACK LISTING

1: The Romantic
2: Feeling Is Law
3: Borderlands
4: Thornfield
5: With My Back To The Tower
6: Friends & Family
7: Scene On A Staircase
8: Our Knives
9: The Archers
10: To Miss The Mark
11: Die Swimming In The Sea Here 

Plaza is the third album by Quilt; a name implying a meeting place, a crossroads, a coming together. In the space of ten songs, Plaza clarifies Quilt’s musical stance of a congregation, mixing folk, pop-psych, and wanderlust into a common ground where each form takes on the characteristics of one another to create something wholly satisfying, styles and sentiments hand in hand, the purest and sharpest distillation of Quilt’s group aesthetic to date.

On Plaza, Quilt has pivoted their sound on a new foothold. The guitars shimmer, squawk, warble, swell, and tense up. The organs and synths flow in the background as mood-enhancers. The drums dig in a little deeper. We hear flutes and harps, a string quartet, grand pianos and Casios, feedback and distorted violas. Among all these sounds the group’s shared and solo vocals showcase some of the strongest lyrics and hooks the band has made to date.

Plaza showcases a tighter, more concise version of Quilt, particularly as the members have learned to encourage each other’s strengths and allow each other to confidently exist as distinct voices cooperating within a very intimate creative space; their songcraft has tightened up, their singing now crystal clear, vis á vis personal experiences of loss, frustration and isolation.

TRACK LISTING

1: Passersby
2: Roller
3: Searching For
4: O’Connor's Barn
5: Eliot St.
6: Hissing My Plea
7: Something There
8: Padova
9: Your Island
10: Own Ways

Acting as a respite from the celebrated strains of modern Australian underground music, Lower Plenty manage a deconstruction of folk music like none other: unsettled, unforgiving, unconcerned with what came before or what’s to follow. Acoustic guitars shuffle in and out of phase with one another, double-tracked vocals hover above in careful meter, brushed snare rattles the very frame of their sound, and then everything shifts again, and again. Comfort’s not long here, though beauty is maintained; melodies start sweet but turn inward, wane nostalgic and wax without resolve.

Life/Thrills is the Melbourne group’s third full-length, and their collective experience will leave you thoroughly unprepared for the beautiful confusion suggested by these ten songs, which seem to have the power of slowing and even stopping time. Suitable comparisons to this music are as disparate as early Cat Power, Arab Strap, the Shrimper roster ca. 1992, the Sun City Girls, and the late ‘60s/early ‘70s output of the Red Crayola, but as with much truly original music, Lower Plenty resists direct comparison and defies expectation. Their shambling, discordant presence will relieve you of any preconceptions – this is one best experienced alone, as the sun fades into the horizon for the night.

TRACK LISTING

1: Waiting On A Tram
2: Calculations
3: Life/Thrills
4: Took A Trip
5: Concrete Floor
6: On The Beach
7: Jealous
8: Go Down
9: You Pushed Me
10: Lots Of Lows

The legacy of North Carolina’s Ashrae Fax seems destined to be appreciated in retrospect, in no small part given to the tremendous power of the group’s 2003 release Static Crash!, reissued twice from its initial CD-R run before appearing on Mexican Summer last year.

The Goth/ethereal duo of vocalist Renée Mendoza and producer/guitarist Alex Chesney had built a long, strange and mostly undocumented legacy prior to that release, and Never Really Been Into It extends the tale back even further: ten songs, sketched out in the late ‘90s, most of which were never completed and remained unheard until now.

Rescued from a shoebox of ephemera from the band’s earliest days, when Mendoza and guitarist Alex Chesney drifted out of high school and into the uncertainties of early adulthood, these songs were the product of a band whose members had nothing but time and ambition, influence and desire to transcend their humble beginnings. Pieced together and re-recorded in 2013 by Renée in her home studio, from mere stems and forgotten takes preserved on decades-old minidisc recordings, the songs reflect disquiet, uncertainty, absolute beauty, along teenage obsessions with The Cocteau Twins and The Cure, refracted through the lens of latter-day experience – pristine musicianship, gorgeous vocals, cryogenically frozen until now. Had these songs been properly released when initially conceived. First new record in over 10 years

For Fans of: Lush, This Mortal Coil, The Cure

TRACK LISTING

1: Dreamers Tied To Chairs
2: Chkn
3: The Big Lie
4: Fits And Starts
5: Decaax
6: Hurricanes In A Jar
7: You Make Me Question My Mind (In A Thousand Words About Time)
8: Intexus
9: Seconds Chances
10: In Motion

Both formats include a free CD bonus disc "Unstrapped", featuring 4 tracks.

The Soft Pack are back with 'Strapped', an adventurous album that finds the Los Angeles-based foursome breaking with expectations and exploring the possibilities of how they can push their sound. In making it, the group took to heart a quote from the sage Pasadena thinker David Lee Roth that goes something like: “The first rule of rock & roll is if it sounds good, it is good.”

The Soft Pack’s history begins in 2007 when Matt Lamkin (guitar/lead vocals) and Matty McLoughlin (lead guitar) started a band in their native San Diego. By the following year they’d added David Lantzman (bass) and Brian Hill (drums). The four of them soon moved up to LA, went on a bunch of tours, and coalesced into The Soft Pack.

Following the two and a half straight years of touring that came both before and after 2010’s self-titled release on Heavenly Recordings (Kemado Records in the US), the band were burnt out but determined to take control of their future. They decided to self-produce their follow-up, which will be released by Kemado’s sister label Mexican Summer. During the previous sessions for their self-titled album they developed 12 songs and recorded all of them - 10 of them made it to the album, the other two became B-sides. In contrast, while making Strapped they created 80 demo ideas, recorded 30 full songs, and then picked their 12 favourite ones for the album, no matter how far out they were.

The group also took their time while making Strapped, making it over the course of two years. This pace allowed them to integrate new ideas and approaches into their existing sound. The Soft Pack’s pop rock foundations are undeniably still present - nine of the songs don’t break three minutes and from the first seconds of glorious album opener “Saratoga” it’s obvious they haven’t abandoned the fuzz. That said, they’ve also spent a lot of time listening to Denim, Momus, The Church, YAZ, Grace Jones, INXS, Carole King, Lee Hazelwood, The Byrds, and Elton John. “Bobby Brown” is an icy new wave number, whose saxophone solo is just one of several horn appearances on Strapped. For “Head on Ice,” they layer on the dark atmospherics and capture a spiraling sense of doom. Maybe the most surprising cut on Strapped is album closer “Captain Ace,” a jubilant space cruiser that jams out to nearly the seven-minute mark…. Enjoy the ride!

TRACK LISTING

1. Saratoga
2. Second Look
3. They Say
4. Tallboy
5. Bobby Brown
6. Chinatown
7. Ray’s Mistake
8. Oxford Ave.
9. Everything I Know
10. Head On Ice
11. Bound To Fall
12. Captain Ace

Bonus Disc Tracklisting:
1. Cruisin' Bruce
2. Densmore's Gone
3. Haven't Got The Means
4. You're Fine

From Houston, TX comes Pink Playground, a new band that makes videos instead of playing live, and runs in the tradition of shoegaze and ethereal sounds right back to the earliest Jesus and Mary Chain demos. Guitars, synths, otherworldly vocals and drum machines collude to the proto-noise pop moment of the mid ’80s, and charges forth as if the band’s members were born to play in that vein. Ear-splitting volume and spun sugar melodies fill the space with pink pollen blizzard dynamics so thick and hazy you might need a dust mask to power through them, songs so sweet that they sting, manners inverted into a new form of aggression.

Graham's first release since the dissolution of RTFO Bandwagon, the elegantly primitive Columbus, OH folk band that most recently released "Dums Will Survive" (March 2009) on Texas' Dull Knife Records. While RTFO Bandwagon heavily reiterated the elements already present in Graham's guitar frameworks with the bass, drums, and even the vocal melodies, Swarming Branch takes a more delicate approach. Throughout "Good Word", each instrument plays only one note at a time, freeing up space in the mix and ensuring that every note is intentional.

To realize this detailed new sound, Graham brought in drummer Ryan Jewell (Terribly Empty Pockets, Pink Reason, Psychedelic Horseshit) and piano wizard Dane Terry. A number of other musicians come and go over the course of the record, including bassist Chris Burney (the Sun) and experimental composer Larry Marotta on slide guitar.

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
I Stole The Lime
Seasonal Delicacies
Red Light Green Light Is A Game For Schoolchildren And I Can't Believe We're Playing It Still
Meatloaf At The Steakhouse
A Little Bit On The Way Out

Side B:
A Little Bit On The Way In
Take It Easy On Kathy At Least She Can Dance
The Grindstone Kid
Fenwick Island Update